A happy day today, December 4th, 2016: Fidel Castro is being burned, his ashes stashed. Amidst a culture that, here and there, worries over micro-aggressions, one of the most egregious macro-aggressors – not least against his own people – has passed into Hell. (I’m not judging, Lord, I’m just sayin’ . . . )

Why bother to rehearse his history of misery? That would be based on the premise that knowing it would matter to the alt-Left – the DiBlassios, Redfords, Keith Ellisons, Steins, Justin Trudeaus and so many woefully ignorant (willfully ignorant), posturing college students who celebrate this vile dictator’s “achievements.” Yet here we have, not a tragedy but a farce: knowing the truth about this gargoyle – including that he died probably a billionaire – would not stay their ideological exhibitionism. After all, he instituted universal health care, didn’t he? As though the same weren’t true of Cell Block D at Sing Sing.

Next to me as I write is Granma: Organo Oficial De Comite Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba, dated November 26th, 2016. (I will translate as necessary.) The headline reads, “Towards victory always, Fidel!” Beneath the death notice is the Decree of the National Counsel respecting National Mourning and a press release from the organizing committee: on November 28th, between the hours of 9am and 10pm the population will give a much merited homage to the their leader. Radio and television will be limited to news only.

The entire rag is eight tabloid pages long, the inside being covered by photos of Himself, mostly old, many over fifty years old from the glory years. A two-page spread tells us that “the world says goodbye to a giant of history” (and includes nine tweets), and the back page describes “un revolucionario de talla [size] mundial.” My favorite piece, though, comes at the middle fold and is titled “the humanist and humanismo.” (Interesting to me is the utter absence of any mention or image of the serial-killing, homicidal maniac Che Guevarra, whose early popularity in those heady days was such that Castro had to send him abroad, eventually to his death in Bolivia.)

All this must remind one of 1984, but it made me feel like what I imagine a paleontologist must feel like when, on a dig, he finds an artifact, say a piece of odd, abandoned crockery that needs explaining, then discovers that people still use this crap. It should be a piece of history, dead and discarded. But no: it – what it stands for – survives, even if as an anachronism, useful to Lenin’s Useful Idiots who would co-opt a fictitious glory and so feel the glow of fifth-hand revolutionism.